From "Counting Heads" by David Marusek

05/31/10 10:49 Filed in: publishing
"Let's read to her," Mary said and took the library from the shelf. But it wasn't a library. It was heavy, and the pages were made of paper. It was a book. The evangelines sat next to the daybed and examined the dusty antique. The first two pages were blank. The book had been published in 2013, in Boston. That must have been the old Boston. There were no glyphs, icons, or illustrations of any kind. The text was threaded over 240 actual pages. When you touched a word, it did not pronounce or define itself or display its links. It just sat there on the paper like a stain."

I like the astonishment of two pages being blank. Signatures, how they determine our lives sometimes. In a digital book, what need for blank pages?

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